MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE I...

Saturday, 21 December 2013

BOOK OF THE YEAR?

Lots to choose from, and for a moment, it was going to be the Morrissey biography, which for sheer hubris is hard to beat, or the Hill Collected, which is magisterial and wonderful, but surely the monumental work, for poetry, in these isles, was actually The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English - a thoroughly recalibrated version of the older, grumpier model, which extends the franchise more widely than might have been thought possible were its new editor not a reasonable and engaged reader. No reader of poetry today would not enjoy flipping through this and seeing how canonical reps jostle with the newly-minted ones. Written by hundreds of hands, it is never less than stimulating, and often informative. And yes, Todd Swift has an entry. There is a god of poetry, sometimes, so suddenly.